The Baker
The latest assignment at Project 52 was to photograph a local entrepreneur that won the fictitious “Entrepreneur of the Year award. The assignment came with specific instructions as to the format of the shoot and included a layout of the text that would be placed over the image. We were free to fake the entire thing, but I got to thinking that it would be great to to actually find a local business person and approach them about my assignment.
Enter Steve and Rose of LeFavorite Bakery here in Warwick, Rhode Island. This local couple have been running their own bakery for the past 4 years, and I have to say that it is a favorite of mine. I have known the couple for many years through our kids activities, so I called Steve up, told him what I wanted to do, and he was on board. I knew exactly what I wanted the image to look like in my head, and I made my plans and studied the magazine layout so that when the big day arrived I would be ready. My idea was to have Steve holding out a tray of very colorful cupcakes. Lighting in place in my head, knew how the tray would fin the frame in my mental image, it was all finished in my head. Got to the bakery that morning, and while the young lady that works the counter went to let Steve know that I arrived I picked out the tray of cupcakes, they were perfect, even decorated with SuperBowl decorations. This was gonna be sweet (awful pun fully intended)!
Steve came out of the back to greet me and we went into the kitchen to talk. The more I looked at Steve the more I thought that he just did not look like a cupcake kind of guy. That’s when I noticed the big oven as Steve went over and opened it up and pulled out a tray of eclair shells as we continued to talk. That was it, colorful cupcakes out, eclairs in. Same concept, a guy holding a tray, but the big old oven just seemed like it was a better fit to the subject. Threw a flash on a light stand with a big shoot threw umbrella camera left to put some light on Steve, fired a few test shots and chimped the histogram and we were in business. Steve was great, he popped the eclairs in and out of the oven a few times, I switched to a wide angle lens so that I had a full length shot that shows a bit more if the environment.
Overall, I was really happy with how this came out, and I liked the tighter shot better, and loved the way that the text overlay fit on both images. My only gripe is that I wished that I had taken my time a bit more and shot some more frames with a few different ideas. If I had slowed down and taken my time I might have thought to try throwing an orange gelled flash into the oven to make it look like it there was a real fire glowing inside. Maybe tried the cupcake image, just to see what happens. After all you never know til you try. I need to come out of my shell a bit more and just relax, have fun and enjoy the process of making an image. In the end I have learned several new things about myself, and the first step necessary to make a change.